Harper was a campus political geek at the University of Calgary when Mulroney won his historic first majority in 1984. For Harper, an Ontario-born former Liberal who had abandoned his old party out of disillusionment with Pierre Trudeau’s National Energy Program, Mulroney’s election must have seemed like a new dawn. He went to Ottawa to work for Calgary West MP Jim Hawkes. But Mulroney took almost two years to roll back the NEP. By then Harper had moved to Calgary, disgusted with the glad-handing and compromises of life in Mulroney’s Ottawa.
By 1987 Harper was at the founding convention of a new western protest movement, the Reform party. He became Preston Manning’s policy director and ran twice against Hawkes, finally beating him in 1993. The near-simultaneous rise of Reform and the Bloc Québécois illustrated the surprisingly rapid disintegration of the Mulroney coalition.
Even at that early stage Harper’s relationship to the older man was complex. Certainly he harboured no illusions about Mulroney’s popularity. “The man has a pettiness and a credibility problem that is so large that it’s tough for voters to support him even when he does things that may benefit their region or benefit them personally,” Harper told a reporter in 1991. “He really is an anathema.”
And yet Harper was reluctant to attack Mulroney personally in the political arena. With political scientist Tom Flanagan, Harper persuaded Manning to run against the constitutional amendments in the Charlottetown accord in 1992. But they also resisted when Manning wanted to label the accord the “Mulroney deal.” That was cheap, Harper and Flanagan argued. Better to argue on substance.
The same ability to coolly gauge Mulroney’s strengths and weaknesses came in handy when Harper became the leader of the Canadian Alliance in 2002. On May 28 of that year, he made his maiden speech as leader of the Opposition in the Commons. The occasion was a debate over an Alliance motion on lumber trade. More or less out of nowhere, Harper announced, “When it comes to United States-Canada relations, the government has much to learn from former prime minister Brian Mulroney . . . Under Mr. Mulroney, Canada-United States relations were infinitely better than they are now.” A Maclean’s reporter quizzed Harper afterward about the speech. “Frankly,” Harper said, “I’m making a political point.”
Seventeen months later Harper announced a deal with the new Progressive Conservative leader, Peter MacKay, to wind down their two parties as legal entities and launch a newly incorporated Conservative Party of Canada. Mulroney was a key behind-the-scenes player in cajoling Progressive Conservatives to sit down with the Alliance. But he was no great admirer of Harper. With former Ontario premier Mike Harris, Mulroney was a none-too-secret backer of millionaire car-parts heiress Belinda Stronach in the race to lead the new party.
Still, Conservatives handed Harper a first-ballot victory over Stronach and Tony Clement. It began to seem a wise choice. Harper made MacKay his deputy leader, wove members of both parties into an effective parliamentary caucus, and built a party office into which nobody was allowed to carry old grudges.
The figure of Brian Mulroney loomed large in Harper’s calculations in those early days of reconciliation. “At the very last Canadian Alliance caucus meeting,” one Harper minister recalls, “Stephen said, ‘We’re going to be building a party with people who revere Brian Mulroney. You need to forget everything you’ve been saying about him for years. And you need to know that right now, Peter MacKay is in their caucus room telling them the same thing about Preston Manning.’ ”
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